Corporations Remain The Biggest Threat To Free Speech

One Google employee caused an uproar this week with a lengthy memo criticizing the company’s diversity obsession.

The letter, which went viral internally at Google before getting leaked to the press, bemoaned the company’s “ideological echo chamber” and its zeal to hire workers based on their group identity rather than their skill.

Google’s message to the world is that it will not tolerate criticism of its politically correct policies from its employees. Though the tech giant claims with a straight face it values a diversity of viewpoints, it’s clear it doesn’t.

Google revealed that it’s in thrall to the dictates of left-wing activists with this termination. It’s a trait Google shares with several other corporations, and that leftist dominance is coming at the price of valuing free speech.

The tech world in particular has recently shown the growth of this developing trend. Twitter is notorious for putting in place “anti-harassment” policies to fight “offensive” speech and suspending numerous accounts on political grounds. Facebook is starting to target “hate speech” due to pressure exerted by left-wing bureaucrats in Europe.

The funding service Patreon, which many writers and podcasters use to support themselves, has banned several right-wing personalities from its platform over their viewpoints. At the same time, Patreon has let Antifa-linked groups that openly advocate violence to remain on its platform for long periods of time.

YouTube recently announced that it was going to do more to clamp down on “controversial” content and the video host has a well-documented history of demonetizing clips for expressing the wrong political views.

On the same day Google fired Damore, Airbnb confirmed it was deleting accounts that the company suspected may be associated with an upcoming alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Airbnb did this in order to prove it is a welcoming platform, according to its own statement.

Apparently, welcoming means banning people who may be suspected — just suspected — of claiming allegiance to the alt-right.

Going back a bit further, there’s Mozilla firing its founder Brendan Eich for quietly donating to anti-gay marriage initiatives, an event that now serves as an early precursor to the current Google mess.

While all these companies are busy rooting out wrongthink, they also like to burnish their progressive bona fides. Google often uses its famous doodles to promote left-wing causes and notions. Twitter’s news aggregator leans far to the left and rarely carries right-leaning points of view. Airbnb offered free housing for migrants left “stranded” by President Trump’s travel ban.

And pretty much all of these companies changed their logos to a rainbow pattern to celebrate when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015.

The Google firing is a chilling example of a major corporation firing someone solely over their viewpoints. This is different from companies kicking off users from the platforms they provide. Taking away a person’s livelihood over their political views is far more serious than ensuring they can’t tweet anymore.

To many Americans, the idea of being unemployable for your political stances seems outrageous. But that’s what these left-wing activists want. Those who wanted Damour’s head claimed they needed his termination in order to make Google a “safer” work environment. This is the exact kind of bullshit campus agitators use to shut down speakers they disagree with.

It’s all about power for these activists. They just deploy their status as minority victims in order to get what they want. The Google scandal has nothing to do with creating a better work environment, it’s all about browbeating the tech giant to follow left-wing standards.

These activists succeeded masterfully in doing so.

Many in America are disgusted with what they see on college campuses and how speech is suppressed and identity politics rule supreme. Some may take comfort that these “snowflakes” will get a rude awakening in the real world. As I wrote in my book “No Campus for White Men,” the major threat of campus insanity is having it spread into the rest of society.

The Google ordeal shows what could be the future of work environments when campus agitators grow up and dominate corporate HR. Your employment will depend on you voicing the right opinions and keeping any dissent hidden deep inside your mind. Meanwhile, your company will openly advocate for left-wing causes and use its power to make the lives of known dissidents as miserable as possible.

Because it’s woke for a major corporation to deny services to wrong thinkers, but it’s fascism if a tiny bakery does the same to a gay couple.

The right to free speech won’t mean much when we, as a society, accept that those who voice unpopular opinions deserve to lose their jobs, their privacy and their ability to speak in the public forums of our time.

Corporations have a lot of freedom in America to operate as they please. But that doesn’t mean the public should acquiesce to Silicon Valley determining only one side should have the right to free speech.